Review of J. Bellamy Foster's 'Ecological Revolution'

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http://www.redpepper.org.uk/An-ecological-manifesto

 

An ecological manifesto

 

'The Ecological Revolution' by John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review Press, 2009

 

Review by Derek Wall of the Green Party of England and Wales

 

This is one of the best books I have read on climate change and the worsening

environmental crisis. John Bellamy Foster is a professor of sociology, but don't

let that put you off – he writes with clarity and great flair. This book, like

his others, is a product of very detailed scholarship. It puts the case that

unless we have ecological revolution based on fundamental change, environmental

problems will lead to catastrophe. He argues that environmental problems have

social causes, that ever-increasing economic growth is unsustainable on our

planet and that the ultimate cause of climate change is capitalism.

Critics of such a view argue that with economic growth, cleaner technologies

develop and greater efficiency allows us to overcome environmental problems.

Foster responds to this argument with a discussion of the `Jevons paradox'.

Jevons, a 19th-century economist, created the marginal analysis that economists

today use when describing supply and demand within the price mechanism. He was

also interested in diminishing resources.

His paradox is based on the fact that when we use a resource more efficiently,

rather than using less of it in total we use more. For example, if cars become

more fuel-efficient any gain to the environment is cancelled out by the fact

that car use tends to grow. The idea that left to the market more efficient

energy solutions will emerge, and such solutions will solve the climate change

crisis, are thus misplaced.

Foster argues in great detail that the present global framework for dealing with

climate change is largely fraudulent. Global agreements on climate change such

as the one at Kyoto have been shaped by powerful industrial interests and are

having no real impact on reducing emissions. He is highly critical of carbon

trading and other capital-friendly environmental policies, which are used to

allow coal mining, oil extraction and airport building to continue.

This brings him back to his central theme: `My premise in this book is that we

have reached a turning point in the human relation to the earth: all hope for

the future of this relationship is now either revolutionary or false.' The book

is produced to encourage such an ecological revolution.

John Bellamy Foster, who edits the journal Monthly Review, is best known for his

early book Marx's Ecology. In it he argues that far from being enemies of

nature, Marx and Engels were keen environmentalists. This assertion, surprising

to many even on the left, is based on their exhaustive writings on air

pollution, deforestation, soil erosion and a series of other serious

environmental problems. Marx and Engels' environmental concern is a key element

of this new book too. Foster argues that insights from their work, especially

Marx's notion of a `metabolic rift' between humanity and the rest of nature, are

key to achieving ecological sanity.

Foster makes his case convincingly and on the way reveals much fascinating

detail. For example, he relates the story of Britain's fertiliser imperialism in

the 19th century, when guano (bird shit to be precise) was transported from Peru

to farms in Britain. His account of the Brando film Burn! from the director of

The Battle of Algiers is also fascinating as an example of green left popular

culture.

Foster finishes by identifying the advance of socialist governments in Latin

America committed to ecological policies as a source of hope. Cuba's commitment

to permaculture and renewable energy, along with similar policies in Venezuela,

are noted. However, Foster argues that the ecological revolution must be made at

the centre of the global system in countries in North America and Europe.

Yet there is little discussion of practical efforts to build eco-socialism at

the heart of the book, though there could have been. In Australia in the 1970s,

the trade union leader Jack Mundy led his building workers union into green

bans, where they refused to construct environmentally destructive projects. In

the UK, nuclear waste dumping at sea was halted in the 1980s by trade union

action, and more recently workers occupied the Vestas wind turbine plant

threatened with closure on the Isle of Wight.

The foundation of an Ecosocialist International Network is a sign of the embrace

of ecosocialism by both traditional socialist groups and currents within Green

parties. Climate Camp, in Britain and elsewhere, has social justice and a

rejection of capitalism built into its analysis, and we've seen the advance of

indigenous struggle globally, which is both radically green and based on demands

for socialism.

Greater analysis of these kinds of developments could have made The Ecological

Revolution even stronger. Nonetheless this is a wonderful book which should be

on the must-read list of all serious reds and greens.

22 November 2009